Friday, August 13, 2010

Four Corners Furtherance: Monument Valley at sunrise

Amidst some sunset photographs of Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah, I wrote about some of the John Ford movies filmed there. Now it's time for sunrise, and a discussion of some of the other famous movies where Monument Valley served as a location.

Do you remember the scene in Forrest Gump, where Tom Hanks' Gump, after running across the country, decides he is tired? It was in the valley. Thelma & Louise bypassed Texas and drove through it, as did the Griswolds in National Lampoon's Vacation.

And Marty McFly, Dr. Emmett Brown, and their malfunctioning DeLorean touched down for Back to the Future III, which was really a Western disguised as a science-fiction film. Which brings me to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But it's best we end with a western: Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in The West. Those "spaghetti westerns" couldn't stay in Italy forever, it needed to go where John Wayne said "God put the West."

The photographs are from both Utah and Arizona. We didn't enter the Navajo Nation's Monument Valley Park on the Utah side, perhaps we were hungry for breakfast, or perhaps we didn't feel like paying five dollars per person--not per car--to see the rest of the valley.

Besides, we had a lot more of Utah to see.

But to get to Utah's Zion National Park, we had to drive through northern Arizona.

Oh...because of Arizona's new immigration law--which I support--some left-wing activists are encouraging a boycott of the Grand Canyon State. Some conservatives, tea partiers especially, are calling for a "buy-cott." We stayed in Kayenta, Arizona--all of the hotels were sold out the night we were there, although about half of the guests in town were foreigners, Germans and French mostly, who probably care as much about our illegal immigration issue as I do about European Union agriculture price supports.

Next: Kayenta has gone to the dogs

Earlier posts:

Monument Valley at sunset
The road to Monument Valley
The monument is closed and in the wrong spot
More of Mesa Verde National Park
Mesa Verde National Park and the Ancients
Gerald R. Ford Memorial Highway
Flatlanders battle the Rocky Mountains and a car gets altitude sickness
Buffalo Bill's gravesite
Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest Ranch
My rattlesnake sighting


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